Was there an ethical breach by Toyota in not coming forth when the problem with
ID: 1246531 • Letter: W
Question
Was there an ethical breach by Toyota in not coming forth when the problem with acceleration was first reported, or was it simply a series of poor business decisions? Or was it both? Substantiate your response. Given the current situation, what would you suggest that Toyota do to ensure that its marketing practices are seen by its publics as ethical and above board? At the same time, how should Toyota market itself to regain consumer trust that has been shaken by the many deaths that resulted because of the initial gas pedal defect?Explanation / Answer
The mechanical issues plaguing eight Toyota models are not the result of human resource professionals assuming product design roles and producing faulty accelerator pedals and onboard computers, but anyone who has studied failure analysis knows that the breaking point of a product or service is seldom the underlying or root cause of the failure. Using the sinking of the Titanic as an example, the damage caused by the hull colliding with the iceberg ultimately sank the ship, but the collision was the result of a series of poor decisions to travel too fast given weather conditions. While hull design flaw contributed to catastrophe, the root cause of the problem was human error. In any situation where employees fail to perform as expected, investigators must determine if the human error could have been caused by factors beyond the employee’s control. Such external factors might include actions by senior management, lack of adequate information or job training, faulty inputs to the process, or rewards that incent actions not in line with documented goals. If you believe in accountability, you have to accept that human errors that lead to corporate catastrophes could be the result of faulty HR processes, most notably those related to acquiring, developing, motivating, and managing labor. Returning to the Titanic example, had the owners of the Titanic implemented rewards for safety as well as speed or hired a captain more detail-oriented, there would have been no crash that dreaded night. Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure. Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform. The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.
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